In the last decade, discourse on sexuality has proliferated more than ever in the political realm in Turkey. The discursive utilization of women’s bodies and sexualities has appeared as the main to...

Gender and sexuality in the authoritarian discursive strategies of ‘New Turkey’:

This article focuses on AKTrolls, defined as pro-government political trolls in Turkey, while attempting to draw implications about political trolling in the country in general. It examines their m...

Social Media in Turkey as a Space for Political Battles: AKTrolls and other Politically motivated trolling

Michels’ ‘iron law of oligarchy’ suggests that oligarchic party rule is inevitable, yet many parties have shown a strong commitment to intra-party democracy. However, Turkey’s akp is a typified case of Michels’ law, displaying an explicit commitment to intra-party democracy, only to later abandon it. I ask what factors have facilitated this transformation. Why does the iron law of oligarchy display itself in some parties but not in others? I argue that intra-party democracy owes its existence to three indicators – inclusiveness, decentralisation and institutionalisation. Conversely, it should be observed that a party shifting from democratic to oligarchic or personalistic intra-party rule will display decreasing levels of these three indicators in terms of policy formation and candidate selection. By tracing akp’s internal party operations since its founding in 2001, I demonstrate a gradual deterioration in these indicators, reflecting a gradual deterioration of democracy within the party to oligarchy and...

The iron law of Erdogan: the decay from intra-party democracy to personalistic rule

On 31 May 2013, a localized demonstration against the destruction of a public park at the heart of Istanbul (Gezi Park) spiraled into a nationwide anti-government protest cycle of unprecedented for...

Turkey's Gezi Park Demonstrations of 2013: A Marxian Analysis of the Political Moment

Since coming to power in 2002, AKP has exerted a range of legal and financial pressures on critical media organisations and professionals, including acts of direct intervention. While the growing literature on Turkey’s media system has explored the influence of political and economic pressures on media freedoms, recent developments necessitate a re-examination that tackles the upsurge of direct government intervention in the country’s commercial media landscape. Through the framework of media capture, this article analyses the disciplinary strategies deployed by AKP and argues that the party’s media capture at recent political junctures (Gezi protests, corruption scandal, coup attempt) is continuous with its past policies and practices and does not necessarily represent an ‘authoritarian turn’.

Authoritarian Turn or Continuity? Governance of Media through Capture and Discipline in the AKP Era

This paper reveals the ways in which media autocracy operates on political, judicial, economic and discursive levels in post-2007 Turkish media. Newsmakers in Turkey currently experience five different systemic kinds of neoliberal government pressures to keep their voice down: conglomerate pressure, judicial suppression, online banishment, surveillance defamation and accreditation discrimination. The progression of restrictions on media freedom has increased in volume annually since 2007; this includes pressure on the Dogan Media Group, the YouTube ban, arrests of journalists in the Ergenekon trials, phone tapping/taping of political figures and the exclusion of all unfriendly reporters from political circles. The levels and tools of this autocracy eventually lead to certain conclusions about the qualities of this media environment: it is a historically conservative, redistributive, panoptic and discriminatory media autocracy.

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Media and Democracy in Turkey: Towards a Model of Neoliberal Media Autocracy

In the case of Turkish cyber hacking groups, the definition of cyber terror does not apply. Instead, a new type of cyber activity is defined, that of disruptive discursive hacking, to identify the concerns of these attacks.

Cyberterror a la Turca

This chapter presents a conceptual two-level approach, focusing on interactions at state and civil society levels. Using the Turkish humanitarian aid to Somalia as a case study to develop further their conceptual framework, the authors examine how state and non-state actors engage with local players in Somalia and how they communicate their presence in the country. Their study demonstrates that Turkey has virtually no cooperation between these two levels in terms of communication about development—Turkish state-led reconstruction attempts in Somalia and the faith-based civil society groups participating in development efforts do not communicate with each other. However, the country enjoys a coherent communication of development rhetoric to promote its foreign aid which enables it to establish links between the two separate levels.

Banu Baybars-Hawks

Papers

Media and Democracy in Turkey: Towards a Model of Neoliberal Media Autocracy

Cyberterror a la Turca

State–Civil Society Partnerships in International Aid and Public Diplomacy: The Case of Turkey and Somalia